Blonding

Chapter 33 : Father-Son Bond

"How long is this supposed to take? It's been hours!"

Boruto dragged out the last syllable with every last fiber of strength his waning self control could wrestle together, flopping onto his back with a very petulant huff.

Naruto sighed with a smile, cracking open an eye to watch his son writhe around in the boat.

It was true; they had sailed all through the night and into the morning. Naruto didn't need a watch that it was now mid-afternoon, the day after they had… picked up Hiashi and Hoheto.

"What are you sighing about?!" Boruto lurched to his feet, pointing an accusing finger at his father. "You knew this would happen, didn't you!"

Naruto just raised an eyebrow. "I never said that the journey to Mist would be a fast one." With another sigh – once again loud enough to the point where he was absolutely sure that Boruto could hear – he hoisted himself up from the floor of their small hired boat to look out over the edge and towards the blue-rimmed horizon.

"We aren't going very fast because we're using an ocean current to move," Naruto explained evenly. "Unless you'd like to grab an oar and start paddling, we're stuck at this pace. So calm down."

Boruto blanched at the idea of having to row. Their boat wasn't all that impressive in size – it was probably no more than twenty feet long and eight feet wide, with a sailless mast that jutted from the craft's center column. Still, having to push not only the boat but its four passengers, even with the assistance of chakra, would be mind-numbingly terrible.

"Well what are we supposed to do now, then? We've already been on this thing for hours," Boruto grumbled, before tossing himself down onto one of the wooden benches that lined the outer wall of the boat, watching as the water lapped up against the outer hull. "We've got all this time to kill…"

Naruto could tell what the boy was thinking just by looking at the way his eyebrows would alternate between attacking one another across his forehead, and retreating up and into his hairline. As such, he understood the tumultuous battle of wills going on within Boruto's mind… purely because the same thoughts were running through his.

This was the first chance they'd had since arriving in the past to actually sit and think. Every other event that had transpired, for better or for worse, had led immediately to the next, and the next, and so on – leaving very little room for debilitation.

Naruto knew all too well the feeling of investing all of one's mental energy for one task and one task only, and the fallout that occurred once the rest of his mind would catch up to him once he completed it. It was almost like an instinctual, animalistic trait – being able to completely disregard the emotional, questioning side of the mind when it really mattered.

But now… now, they had all the time in the world.

And the events of the last few days had begun to bombard Boruto with wave after wave of "what if"s and "could have been"s.

Then, the implications of their disappearance tiptoed into Naruto's mind with all the subtlety of a drunken elephant. If they were here, what was going on in their timeline? What would happen when the world found out that they were missing… if they were missing at all?

An unsettling thought surfaced.

What if there was no coming back? What if Naruto and his son were essentially just clones – no longer tied to the original?